ABSTRACT
In a poem prefacing the 1657 publication of Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen now commonly understood as a collaboration by John Marston, Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, and John Daya writer known only by the initials PI articulates the relevance of this Elizabethan tragedy for its Interregnum audience. Though PI deploys the Moor as a political exemplum, issues of racial differentiation emerge at two points in the poem. As such, PI's comment can be understood as a racial articulation made during a time when concepts of racial difference were in less ideological flux and beginning to be more largely grounded in the body than on religion, for example. Recently, Elizabeth Spiller has explored the relationship between early modern reading practices and race. The general premise of physiognomic tracts is that, due to one's humoral makeup, any person may have a dark complexion, including Europeans.
